In retrospect, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were the rarest thing of all: American media about how war is bad, actually

r/boardgames is losing it because a 50% tariff from China and a global recession is going to kill kill the current modern board games industry, but IMO what’s dying is “overproduced board games”, if you’ve got a laser printer, a few decks of playing cards, some dice, index cards, markers, scissors, the world is your oyster

one thing about following the /r/BuyCanadian subreddit is folks’ll post a basket full of nothing but cheezies and Canadian Whiskey and go “i’m switching to Canadian products” and you look at their cart and have to suppress your urge to say “please also buy a vegetable, we make some of those here too”

but honestly, if you were making do with nothing but cheetos and jim beam before, I’m still glad you made the switch

I was a bit surprised how whiskey focused this trade war has been so far.

“What’s that going to accomplish, how much whiskey could Canadians possibly drink?”

“Oh. Oh wow. That’s … that much, huh?”

so, I was sitting here thinking that both Mexico and Korea have really pioneered adding cheese to corn in clever, delicious ways like “elote” and that the USA is way behind in strategic corn-cheesing technology, and then I remembered where they took the same concept:

doritos

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.